


happy is the heart

by fruitwhirl



Series: peraltiago tumblr prompts [5]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, amy's inability to cook is fully exploited here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 06:16:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13070850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitwhirl/pseuds/fruitwhirl
Summary: Amy can't cook and Jake loves her for it.





	happy is the heart

**Author's Note:**

> i got a prompt for "amy/jake + in the moment kiss" and then this happened.
> 
> title from "everybody" by ingrid michaelson!!!

It is a well-known fact that Amy can’t cook. From the baking soda mashed potatoes he’s heard horror stories of from Terry and Charles, to the disastrously over-salted baked ziti she tried to offer the captain and him while they had the mumps, she doesn’t exactly know her way around a kitchen. In fact, the first time he stayed at her place—before they started dating, he used to crash on her couch when they’d be working on a particularly grueling case—he woke up with a crick in his neck to the shower running, and made his way to her cupboards, only to find them bare except for some hot cocoa mix, two coffee bean tins, and a half-empty bag of pretzels that smelled stale. Her fridge was even worse, containing only a couple of bruised apples and some fruit-flavored water bottles. Eventually, the contents will grow to include orange soda and a variety of breakfast cereals, but her cooking skills are still abysmal.

Sometimes, they’ll be lying in bed with her head on his chest, his arm flung loosely around her waist, and the blue floral-patterned duvet pulled up to her nose because she insists it’s cold, when he’ll feel her shift and be looking up at him. She’ll ask if she’s a good cook, and he’ll _laugh,_ and then she’ll frown, start to pull away, and he’ll tighten his hold on her, explain that they have twenty take-out menus in the drawer of their nightstand for a reason.

Amy will shake her head, grumble something against his collarbone. When he asks her to repeat what she said, his brow furrowed, she’ll whisper that her mother was always trying to teach her how to cook, and it was the only thing she could never learn—and well, it makes sense why she’s insecure about it. Jake’s eaten some of the leftovers her brothers drop off for her when they’re in town (he’s personally a big fan of her _lechon asado_ and _papas rellenas_ ), and, yeah, Camila Santiago is an amazing cook. He thinks there’s something more there, he always does, but she’ll just stay silent for a while, and mumble out a “never mind,” and clutch him tighter.

They decide to take a couple’s cooking class together, and honestly, it goes about as well as Jake expects, and as poorly as Amy fears. Maybe it was destined to fail, because that night’s theme is “Chutney the Front Door, We're Making Samosas!”1 and the woman running the class looks and acts, almost impeccably, like the female version of Charles.

And it starts out fine. One of the things he loves about Amy is how much she loves learning (he calls her a dork sometimes, but it’s always with the biggest, dopiest—according to Rosa—smile on his face), and she’s a remarkably good student. At least for the first few steps. Yeah, she forgets to flour the counter before rolling the dough, but Jake remembers so it’s fine. It’s when they go to stir-fry the filling that they both realize with a start that the popping oil has definitely reached rather excessive levels and when the instructor rushes over to them, yelping, Jake just calmly asks his beautiful, intelligent, kind girlfriend of two years how much oil she put into the pan and she responds with a nonchalant “three cups,” leading to the female-Charles nearly passing out because it was apparently three _tablespoons._

They’re kicked out of the class for the night, but the instructor tells them through gritted teeth to come back next week for “Czech, Please! Fresh Kolaches!” and they nod while silently agreeing to never return. Jake expects her to freak about it all, honestly, as they’re making their way down Vanderbilt (thankfully, the community center that houses the class is only a few blocks from their apartment in Prospect), but instead she just holds his hand, laces their fingers together while talking rather animatedly about this book she started reading the other day _have I told you about it yet?_ , written by one of those Russian authors with a ridiculously difficult to pronounce last name. He’s not surprised by her resilience. They stop by her favorite Polish place on the way back, and eat their microwave-warm pierogis on the couch while they watch HGTV. She ends up tucked into his side, a crossword in her hands and a blanket draped across their laps as if she didn’t nearly burn their workstation neighbors’ skin an hour ago with hot oil, and when _Property Brothers_ is over, Jake notices a piece of garlic stuck in her hair—he brushes it away, but quickly follows it with a light press of his lips to the skin just above her brow, which furrows.

She looks up at him from her puzzle (her favorite part of the night), asks, “What’d you do that for?”

“I love you,” is all he can say. But he apparently doesn’t need to expand, because she smiles so softly his heart practically aches, and she whispers the three words back before kissing his cheek with the kind of care that makes him want to marry her even more than he thought possible.

(She’s really gotta stop doing stuff like this, because one of these days he’s not going to be able to stand it and will pop the question right then and there.)

In an effort to avoid hard-to-answer questions about race, Jake and Amy attempt to bake a cake for their charges, the adorable Cagney and Lacey. And surprisingly, it goes okay. She digs around in the cupboards until she can find a single, almost expired, box of cake mix, and Jake makes sure to grab each of the ingredients to ensure that they get the right kind of oil because she’s messed that up before and he’d rather not feed Terry’s kids something that will make them sick. Yeah, Amy can’t crack eggs cleanly to save her life, almost leaving the bits of shell in the batter before Jake deftly removes them with a fork, and yeah, they can’t find icing so he has to run to the convenience store down the street to see if they have _anything_ remotely tasting like sugar sweet, and he’s halfway there when he realizes that he didn’t tell his beautiful sweet intelligent girlfriend to check how well-cooked the cake is with a toothpick. He speeds the entire way back.

(But she ends up flicking chocolate frosting on his nose while they’re icing the cake, and in retaliation he smears the confection across her cheek before dipping down and tasting it on her lips.)

Even when Jake goes to prison, he’s not entirely sure if the prison food is worse than some of Amy’s more experimental concoctions, but when he’s lying on the rock that they call his mattress and listening to her talk through his illegal cell-phone, he asks if she’s tried to cook anything since he’s been gone. She just sighs, murmurs something along the lines of accidentally setting the kitchen on fire while making chorizo, and he nearly bursts out in laughter—unsurprised by the fact that she can make him grin, die from hysterics, even when his life is literally being threatened by a prison gang leader.

When he’s released, and they get home from the bar, slightly buzzed, Amy leads him to their breakfast table and pushes him down into the little wooden chair, grinning so widely that he’s almost concerned, until she exclaims that she made him brownies to celebrate the end of his wrongful incarceration. The one he chooses ends looking _and_ tasting like a chocolate brick, with an emphasis on the brick, but when she asks how it is he just gives her a thumbs-up, and she laughs. “You’re lying to me. I forgot brown sugar and thought white would work but it doesn’t.”

He tries to insist that _no, it’s great,_ but she just shakes her head, climbs onto his lap, pushing the dessert—if you can even call it that—away and winding her arms around his neck, kissing him hard. He thinks he gets chocolate on the back of her blouse, but she won’t realize that until they’re picking up their rather hastily discarded clothes from the floor tomorrow morning (or whenever they end up doing laundry).

A Saturday morning, a few weeks after they get engaged and a couple days after the disaster Thanksgiving dinner with their families, Jake wakes up to a disappointingly empty bed, but he smells smoke. For a moment, he’s reminded of when he was a kid and instead of normal methods, he’d be awoken by the smoke detector’s _beep beep beep_ and something burning, and he’d stumble into the yellow-wallpapered kitchen to find his mother engulfed in an art project (usually something for her students) while their toaster emitted black columns of smoke because she accidentally left a paper towel in there.

That all said, he’s used to kitchen fires.

But he soon connects the lack of dark, dark hair in his face and cold feet sandwiched between his with the current predicament, and realizes his fiancée is trying to cook. And is predictably failing.

It takes him two seconds to pull on his socks and rush into their tiny kitchen with its white-tile backsplash, various pots and pans—he didn’t even know they _had_ this much—scattered around the countertops, only to see detective Amy Santiago scurrying about the linoleum floor. She doesn’t even notice him as she frantically moves to the sink, but _he_ definitely notices the way the oversized long-sleeve NYPD shirt that they most definitely stole from Terry at one point hangs off her frame, falling to right around mid-thigh. The rest of her legs are bare except for a pair of fuzzy house shoes she must have slipped on, and her hair’s tied up into the smallest little ponytail in the world; when she came home with her locks shorn, he lamented only for the lost opportunity to pull on and just generally play with the ponytail like he’s done for the past eight years.

He approaches her from behind, snaking his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. Because she’s used to this by now, she doesn’t even flinch, but her body is taut and tense, like it is when she’s focusing on a piece of evidence at a crime scene. He presses a soft kiss to the underside of her jaw, before peering over her hands to the stove where she’s definitely got three eggs worth of burnt, blackened dairy in the skillet.

She’s groaning and he’s pulling back only to spin her around to have her face him, and she’s brandishing a spatula and she’s mumbling a mix of Spanish and English like she does when she gets frustrated, and her entire face is furrowed and scrunched up, and he just can’t take it—he cups her face in his palms, leans down to press his lips to hers and he feels her body _melt,_ and he even thinks he hears a _clink_ of metal hitting the floor. Even though they both definitely have morning breath, she opens her mouth up to him, resting her hands on the bare skin of his hips. As his fingers drift to the base of her neck to free her hair from its tie, Jake wonders how he got to be so lucky.

He’s just got her up against the dishwasher when she pushes softly against his chest, pulling away with her lips chapped red. Her pupils are blown wide, cheeks flushed, but the rest of her expression is scrunched together, with that same worried look that’s on her face sometimes when they’re lying in bed together and she starts to talk about her mother and cooking and why it’s so important to her.

She bites her lip. “You know I can’t cook.”

“I’ve always known that. One time you made homemade ice cream and mixed up the salt with sugar.” When her expression remains serious, he sobers. “Why does it bother you so much?”

Her hands drift to his, which have dropped by his side, and her thumbs stroke his softly, her gaze directed downward. “I just, I’m not used to not being good at things. And before, I didn’t care so much, because even though I grew up in a house where my mom cooked extravagant meals, even on her off days, I just—I never felt like my inability to cook spaghetti without supervision was a real detriment to anyone but me.” Amy breathes in a deep, shuddering sigh. “I want to be able to provide for our family one day. I don’t want the Polish place down the street to be their only means for like, food.”

They’ve talked about their future family together—hell, it’s even on their life calendar that hangs above their bed—but she’s never been so open, so able to voice her fears concerning it all. He presses a soft, soft kiss to the skin above her eyebrow, another to her forehead. “Maybe you’ll never be like Boyle when it comes to food, but I know you and I know that when you put your mind to something, you’ll figure it out.” He drops a peck on her nose. “And even if you don’t, my mom set the kitchen on fire more times than I can count, so I can make a mean grilled cheese.”

She looks like she wants to say something, but her eyes are wide and smiling and when she hooks her arm around his neck and pulls him down, he can feel her grin widely against his lips. The conversation about this isn’t over, not really, but it definitely ends for the time being when the smoke detector goes off and they just notice the clouds of gray smoke rising from the definitely burnt eggs.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. these were actual titles for cooking events at an actual community center can we talk about that.
> 
>  
> 
> anyways, let me know your thoughts!!!


End file.
